Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Ted Neward has written a great post on one of my favorite subjects: the object relational problem. He calls it 'The Vietnam of Computer Science'. I've thought for a long time that the OR mapping problem is currently the main challenge in developing business applications. I've faced these issues head on when I developed my own data-access-layer code-generator. Funnily enough, although it's such a huge issue in application design, there aren't any really good books on the subject (that I know of). Martin Fowler, Eric Evans and Rocky Lhotka all touch on the issues in their books on enterprise application development, but I've never seen it exhaustively covered anywhere. Ted's post is an excellent summary of the main compromises you have to make, but I'd really like someone to write the definitive book on the subject.

Hi there - I am not very familiar with what exists in the .NET space, but over in Java world a variety of ORM tools and even two competing standard APIs supporting different implementations are available.

My book "Core Java Data Objects" might be a useful read to learn more about ORM in general.

Code Rant

Notepad, thoughts out loud, learning in public, misunderstandings, mistakes. undiluted opinions. I'm Mike Hadlow, an itinerant developer. I live (and try to work in) Brighton on the south coast of England. Please don't mistake me for an expert in anything. I love technology and programming, but make no claims to be any good at it. Much of what you read here may be poorly thought out, wrong, or just plain dangerous.